The present disclosure relates generally to the field of networking and more particularly to a method and apparatus for directing traffic around congestion in a network.
Networks that need to support real-time inelastic services such as voice and video may need a controlled environment that allows guarantees on the quality of service to be provided to traffic. One method of ensuring that quality of service constraints can be met is to limit traffic on the network to an amount which is well below the network bandwidth limit. Such a solution is not cost-effective as it blocks information from being transmitted on the network although other paths are underutilized and does not allow the full capacity of the network to be utilized. One method that is used to ensure that a network is fully utilized is to introduce traffic into the network onto different paths until the network becomes congested and packets are lost. However, lost packets adversely affect the quality of service realized by traffic in the network. Because real-time traffic is particularly sensitive to packet loss and delay it is desirable to detect congestion before packets are dropped or significantly queued and quality of service is adversely affected.